FITE - Future Integrated Testing Environment

Abstract

It is a well known fact that the later software errors are discovered during the development process, the more costly they are to repair. Recently, automatic tools based on static and dynamic analysis have become widely used in industry to detect errors, such as null pointer dereferences, array indexing errors, assertion violations, etc. However, these techniques are typically applied late in the development cycle, and thus, the errors
detected by such approaches are expensive to repair. Additionally, these techniques can suffer from scalability and presentation issues due to the fact that they are applied late in the development cycle.

To address these issues we suggest that code should be continuously analyzed from an early stage of development, preferably as the code is written. This will allow developers to get instant feedback to repair errors as they are introduced, rather than later when it is more expensive. This analysis should also be incremental in nature to allow better scaling.  Additionally, the presentation of errors in static and dynamic analysis tools can be improved due to the small increment of code being analyzed.